Mockingbird politics

A. and I went camping this weekend, and I had an (admittedly drunken) talk with one of my bros., who is getting more conservative as he grows older. Sadly, he was the one who was most enthusiastic about Obama when he came in – and he is exactly the type Obama lost with his ‘compromises’ and inability to recognize the cratering of middle class American lifestyles we’ve been witnessing. He’s looking for that fabled beast, the reasonable republican.

Anyway, to my insistence on the fact that political talk shouldn’t be hemmed in by the “we can’t afford it” mantra when in fact the ‘we’ is the bottom 80 percent who owns 25 percent of the wealth, while the “we’ in the top 20 percent, who owns 75 percent of the wealth, is rich as fuck and can definitely afford it, he made a very wise and so far unbeatable reply: “I’ve heard this over and over, but the cost for the social programs don’t come out of the rich. The rich always win. So in the end, they come out of me.”

This is true. And I think it explains much of the vile politics of the Bush-Obama era. You cannot run a New Deal social insurance system while at the same time encouraging a pre-New Deal division of wealth. It just doesn’t work. The reason the mantra of the rich against tax increases works is because, in reality, everybody out there knows that the tax increase, while it might hit the wage class, will spare the wealthy. Meanwhile, the government does all it can to ‘de-regulate” and “privatize”, adding further costs to the wage class and causing streams of money to rise like manna towards the bloodsuckers. Obama’s disastrous administration is simply the logical result of a welfare state that has evolved into a welfare for the rich state. It is getting worse in this “crisis”, not better. It is the first economic crisis, perhaps, since 1848 in which there is no “left” flank – not a single powerful organization or party. Just right flanks, socialist parties adopting Austrian economics, and the like.

According to the polls, the group that Obama has pissed off the least, in the last year, is liberal Democrats. Which does make me wonder why these people consider themselves liberal. I imagine that tattered word now covers a sort of fan base – it isn’t really a political viewpoint at all, but more of a warm feeling towards certain celebrity figures.

At least for people like me, with no stake in the system and no hope for change, this is the moronic inferno of our mockingbird dreams. We mock, because we can’t act.

Looting in the plutocene!

Comparison: an old and reliable enlightenment tool. The philosophes loved the whole idea of comparison, for it seemed to magically produce progress in ideas. Unfortunately, comparison, as the elementary student of dialectics knows, simply fossilizes the embryo idea – leaving it forever in a pre-natal state unless it is vigorously moved forward via the forceps of antithesis and inversion.

However, under the shadow of that dialectic move, comparison still holds a great deal of anarchic power – satirical power. The enlightenment prehended the limits and fate of comparison in the preference given to satire.

To which I want to revert. Let us compare stories of looting.

Here’s one. It comes from the Royal Bank of Scotland. The Bank received 541 billion dollars worth of 1 percent and below loans from the Fed over the past 3 years. Why? Well, the Bank was preserved for all of us, we are told. Or rather, not told – our governors don’t have to tell us these things, they act for our own good. But the fluffers in the news, the bloggers and pundits, and sometimes the economists tell us that this was all for our good.

Oh, that good! So general we can barely feel it. But so specific that we can name whose good was served by the Fed’s kindly action. 9 people in the upper management of RSB, according to this story from 8 March 2011:

“… the nine key staff – including chief executive Stephen Hester – had been handed bonuses for 2010 of £10m in shares with a further £18m in long-term incentive plans that run until 2014 when their exact value will be known.

... The RBS disclosures came just 24 hours after Barclays lifted the lid on the pay deals it makes to its highest earners – handing five of them £110m.

Hester – whose £2m bonus for 2010 was announced last month and will be paid in shares – is receiving an extra £4.5m in stock through the long-term incentive plan on top of his annual bonus and £1.2m salary. This puts him on track for a pay deal of around £7.7m. For 2009 he did not take a bonus but received just over £4m through the long-term share plan.

Finance director Bruce van Saun is receiving £1.3m in shares for his 2010 bonus and a further £2.8m through the long-term incentive plan.

The largest bonus awarded in shares is the £2.5m handed to John Hourican, head of the investment bank. Next week it is likely to emerge that Hourican has received more than that because he is also being paid in the bank's debt – although he is not expected to top the £7.7m that Hester could be handed if he meets all his performance criteria.

American-based Ellen Alemany also emerges as a top earner with a £1.1m bonus in shares and £2.5m of stock awarded through the long-term plan. Nathan Bostock, who runs the parts of the bank being shut down or sold off, gets £637,000 in shares for his 2010 bonus and £2m through the long-term plan. Brian Hartzer, who runs the retail bank, had £600,000 awarded in shares for 2010 and £1.9m in the long-term plan.

The 2010 awards are coming from the £950m payout pool agreed with UK Financial Investments, which controls the taxpayer's 83% stake in the bank, at the time of the Project Merlin deal.

The Merlin deal requires the pay of the five highest earners reporting to the chief executive to be announced and RBS is expected to make those disclosures next week. The nine included in Tuesday's announcement are expected to be among them.”

And then there is the story of the looting that occurred on the streets of London and Liverpool and other cities in the UK. Disgraceful! It must have been considerable, as there are 1,000 people going to jail for it. So what are the figures we are talking about?

“In Bristol police released dramatic footage of a jewellery shop being looted in the city centre, and still images of 17 alleged rioters taken on Monday night, and urged the public to name them. The videos from CCTV systems in the Cabot Circus shopping centre capture a group of at least 10 men, women and youths, some on bikes, breaking through the window of the Thomas Sabo jewellery shop where thousands of pounds of goods was stolen.”

“It has been estimated that the UK riots thus far have cost high street retailers around £80m in lost sales. High value shops like HMV, GAME and Comet were all the targets of looting.”

"...Carter, of James Street, Salford, was caught in King Street, Manchester, with a bag of clothes and shoes worth £500. He was sentenced to 16 months in jail for theft by finding.

The maximum sentence of six months in jail that lower courts can hand out was deemed not to be enough by magistrates.

A fourth person to be sentenced on Tuesday was Linda Boyd, 31, who received a 10-month suspended jail sentence. She was also handed an 18-month supervision order.

The court heard Boyd, of Acomb Street, Moss Side, was found by a police officer with a bag full of cigarettes and alcohol, so heavy she could not carry it.

In all, the looting carried out over three nights in the UK amounts to not even a single day of borrowing from TALF by Royal Scotland – amounts, in fact, to about an hour of borrowing. I find the numbers interesting. I find the proportion
interesting. I find it interesting to compare the danger to society of Ms Boyd, of Acomb street, with her bag of looted cigs, and the danger to society posed by Ms. Ellen Alemany, with her bag of £1.1m bonus in shares and £2.5m of stock. However, the stock and shares were never so vulgar as to be materialized as something you put in a bag – Ms. Boyd’s big mistake.

Now, Ms. Ellen Alemany sounds like a nice enough person, unlike the vile cig smoking Ms. Boyd. Daughter of a liquor store owner. Making her way to the top by hard work, no doubt. After carrying off her swag from RSB, she was given an honorary degree from a Rhode Island college in May of this year: PROVIDENCE, R.I. - Ellen Alemany, Head of RBS Americas and Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Citizens Financial Group, Inc. has been named an Honorary Doctor of Business Administration at Bryant University. This honorary degree was presented at the school’s undergraduate commencement on May 21, 2011.

“I am honored by this degree from Bryant University, one of Rhode Island’s great institutions” In its citation, the University commended Ms. Alemany as someone “who in both her personal and professional life exemplifies what being excellent in the world of commerce means. At a time when many financial institutions and their leaders have failed to merit public scrutiny and approval, you make it a point to be worthy of the trust of your customers, employees, and your leadership team.
“Those who are familiar with you say that even before the financial crisis you were thought of as an authentic banker—a person with an unending commitment to excellence and accountability. To this end, you re-launched the corporate campaign, GOOD BANKING IS GOOD CITIZENSHIP, reminding us all why banks exist and the critical role they play in fostering growth and prosperity, that in a most essential way they are meant to serve the communities where they exist. Indeed, good citizenship for you is embedded not just in the name of your company, you see to it that it is rooted in your daily corporate culture.”

“I am honored by this degree from Bryant University, one of Rhode Island’s great institutions,” Ellen Alemany said. “This is a special time for the Class of 2011 and I was proud to be a part of Commencement as this year’s graduates prepared to leave Smithfield for the careers and the life journey for which Bryant has prepared them so well.”

Strangely enough, the honorary award said not word one about the fact that Ms. Alemany was part of the group who presided over one of the UK’s great Bank collapses, albeit as head of an American subsidiary. But bygones are bygones – save when you are caught after a riot with a bagful of cigs. Then it is six months for you, and eviction from public housing.

Perhaps our Bryant University friends are merciful Christians of the type that can overlook women without bags of cigs and alcohol, but stuff up the bungus with stock and shares. Let's roll the tape back to distant 2008, when this happened:


“No comment at the weekend from ROYAL Bank of Scotland officials on reports that its American subsidiary Citizens Financial Group was under investigation by the US regulator for deleting e-mail records vital to an investigation into the mis-selling of financial products to the elderly.

Two New England newspapers reported last week that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was involved in an investigation by the Massachusetts state regulator for the alleged "unethical and dishonest conduct" in selling variable annuities.

These are tax-deferred investments that provide periodic payments to investors. They are considered inappropriate for elderly investors as their value rises or falls with the underlying investments, usually stock or bond mutual funds. Gaining access to the fund carries a hefty surcharge.

Citizens chairman Larry Fish, who earned £2.3 million last year and whose multi-million dollar "secret" bonus scheme was attacked at the RBS annual meeting in Edinburgh in April, has defended Citizens Financial as "an ethical entity", but has refused to comment on the details of the state investigation, or whether the SEC was involved.

Massachusetts secretary of state William Galvin accused the bank of not co-operating with the inquiry.

The Massachusetts Securities Division, which regulates banks in neighbouring Rhode Island, where Citizens Financial is based, lodged a complaint against its brokerage arm, accusing it of failing to preserve e-mail crucial to the variable annuities inquiry.

The complaint said Citizens "failed to preserve e-mail communications related to its business as a broker-dealer, despite having an affirmative obligation to do so". The lost e-mail has "substantially and severely impeded" the investigation into the sales of variable annuity investments to elderly customers, Galvin's office said.

It had filed an earlier complaint in February, accusing Citizens of violating securities laws in connection with variable annuity sales.”

I think it all comes down to weight, doanit? For our governors, the weight of deleted emails (zero!) must be balanced against a bag of looted stimulants (which our lootress can barely carry!). Thus, off to the clink with the one, and off to the honorary degree ceremony with the other. And thus the wheels of justice grind, and the grinders simply hope never to be caught under them. Build those gated communities high! Anyone who, in fact, advocates that the grinders feel a bit of justice gets kicked straight off Facebook and five years in a cell for em!

The plutocratic riot has been televised. Nobody cared. It will, of course, destroy your lifestyle and your children's, but don’t get mad at our gentle kleptocrats! For Look! A vicious looter in a hoodie!

Table 8- our Hoover Dam!

The news is full of pundits worrying and stories tutting about our swollen entitlements culture. Our middle class leaches. Our wage class deadbeats. The news is full of stories about how the government is going bust providing a safety net to the poorest, who incidentally, don’t appreciate it at all and smoke dope.

The news is not full of the greatest safety net ever devised. It is as if we are hiding our light under a basket! What the Hoover Dam was to the culture of the thirties, Table 8 of the GAO report on the Fed is to the culture of the 00s. We should be proud of our men in blue (suits), whose hands no doubt were stricken with carpal tunnel aches and pains as they shoveled money into the pockets of the wealthiest.

Here’s table 8.

Table 8: Institutions with Largest Total Transaction Amounts (Not Term-Adjusted) across Broad-Based Emergency Programs
(Borrowing Aggregated by Parent Company and Includes Sponsored ABCP Conduits), December 1, 2007 through July 21,
2010
Dollar in billions
Borrowing Parent Company TAF PDCF TSLF CPFF Subtotal AMLF TALF Total loans
Citigroup Inc. $110 $2,020 $348 $33 $2,511 $1 - $ 2,513
Morgan Stanley - 1,913 115 4 2,032 - 9 2,041
Merrill Lynch & Co. 0 1,775 166 8 1,949 - - 1,949
Bank of America Corp 280 947 101 15 1,342 2 - 1,344
Barclays PLC (Uk) 232 410 187 39 868 - - 868
Bear Stearns Co. - 851 2 - 853 - - 853
Goldman Sachs - 589 225 0 814 - - 814
Royal BankScotland 212 - 291 39 541 - - 541
Deutsche Bank AG (Germany) 77 1 277 - 354 - - 354
UBS AG (Switzerland) 56 35 122 75 287 - - 287
JP Morgan Chase & Co. 99 112 68 - 279 111 - 391
Credit Suisse Group AG (Switzerland) 0 2 261 - 262 0 - 262
Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. - 83 99 - 183 - - 183
Bank of Scotland PLC (United Kingdom) 181 - - - 181 - - 181
BNP Paribas SA (France) 64 66 41 3 175 - - 175
Wells Fargo & Co. 159 - - - 159 - - 159
Dexia SA (Belgium) 105 - - 53 159 - - 159
Wachovia Corporation 142 - - - 142 - - 142
Dresdner Bank AG (Germany) 123 0 1 10 135 - - 135
Societe Generale SA (France) 124 - - - 124 - - 124
All other borrowers 1,854 146 14 460 2,475 103 62 2,639
Total $3,818 $8,951 $2,319 $738 $15,826 $217 $71 $16,115

irresponsible socialism: now more than ever!

I left the following rather mild comment on an economics site about “WHAT SHOULD BE DONE”, thee Chernyshevsky caps included : “Hike the capital gains tax to 39 percent, Start separate tax categories for the individuals making more than 400 thou and more than a million thou per year and bring their marginal rates back to pre-Reagan levels. Remember, spending is great. It is what the gov. should do. And it should do it without the keynesian mumbo jumbo, which is a political stupidity. Instead of a stimulus, a patchwork of government spending justified, each piece, by the product or service it will bring. This is where economists, who live in a world of aggregates, have no psychological feel for the way the voter thinks at all. To call it a stimulus was from the beginning an idiocy. But spending on infrastructure, spending on research, taking over some banks and backing massive, trillion dollar loans to the middle class - that is an idea whose time is still here.”



In reply, I was told, as I often am told, that I am a socialist. I have no business experience. I am one of those people who have the attitude of all take and no give. I am one of those people who say about our massive deficit that it should be paid by “anyone but me.”



This rather charmed me. Anyone but me is an excellent guide to our current crisis. Firstly, of course, one should refute the nonsense that businesses live on the Responsible Me principle. In fact, capitalist enterprise in our epoch is founded wholly on anyone but me. This is standard practice - one always tries to offload costs. Ask the oil companies who cleans up after they cut canals through bayou country and the swamps start to salinize. Anyone but me. Ask the power companies who should pay for the enormous costs of nuclear accidents. Anyone but me. Ask the banks who should pay for trillion dollar mistakes in trick investing involving useless financial instruments. Anyone but me. Anyone but me is the principle of the top 1 percent income bracket.


Luckily, that bracket makes enough that whacking them with taxes will not diminish their life styles in any noticeable way. Their healthcare will be excellent, their vacations will be primo, their children will go to the best schools, etc. Money, at a certain point, is all about power. And power is there to ensure that the anyone but me ideology works every time there is an oopsy moment. It is, in other words, insurance against the supposed 'Darwinism' of capitalism.

After the GAO report on the 16 trillion - trillion - dollars in 'emergency loans', at emergency interest rates of less than one percent, hat floated the entire investor class over the last three years, I would think that there'd be a certain shame about pretending that us 'socialists' know nothing about business. We do - we just don't know how to do socialism. The wealthy, however, have perfected that art. It is time to learn from them.

why american liberalism has the attractiveness of a dripping faucet

The debt ceiling crisis was comedy relief of a high order. Afficianados of American Plutocracy slapstick appreciated the fact that as we were assured that "terrorists" were holding America, or at least Obama, 'hostage', the GAO released its audit of the Fed's very beautiful and efficient welfare system for the rich. It turns out that the Fed loaned out 16 trillion dollars at below 1 percent interest to anyone who owned a Rolls or a hedgefund, making life for the upper crust - squeezed as they were by the pesky recession - so, so much better. It is reported that Citicorps bosses were able, finally, to get dental work and dairy products - poor things were suffering on the street. They were also able to get homes in the Hamptons, yachts, Van Goghs and other perks that keep them mentally agile. We are so lucky.

But I am most amused by the general liberal indignation that the Republican congressmen, elected on the pledge to radically cut federal spending, actually did cut federal spending. It was the vileness of this approach to politics that was especially scorned by NYT editorialists and Dem fluffers. Paul Waldman, the D.C. Dem apparatchik who writes at TAPPED, put it best when comparing Dems to Republicans:

"Let’s say that Mitt Romney is the next president. Are congressional Republicans going to threaten to torpedo the economy if their demands aren’t met? Of course not. First, because their priorities will be basically the same as his, and more important, because they know that undermining the economy is bad for the ruling party. But would Democrats do the same thing Republicans just did? Refuse to raise the ceiling unless they extract all kinds of concessions to move policy more in their preferred direction?

It’s hard to see it. That’s not because Democrats are incapable of playing hardball, it’s just that when they do, it tends to be on a smaller scale. Holding a gun to the economy’s head is something that requires a high tolerance for risk, an indifference to the suffering of ordinary people, and confidence that your opponents will cave before you will. Republicans have more of all three. So what we’re likely to see is that when there’s a Republican president, the debt ceiling will be raised, with some half-hearted attempts by progressive Democrats to get something in return, but when there’s a Democratic president, we go through this whole ugly process again and again."

Holding a gun to the economy's head! So ungenteel. As ideology has lost its savor and importance in the D.C. world, what has become ultraimportant is gentility - good manners. Maturity. The American economy, for instance, obviously needed a transfusion of trillions of dollars into banks and the financial sector so that we could "avoid a depression" - and such is the maturity of the Dems that they did not bother discussing it with the people. Similarly, elected on the promise, in 2006, to end the war, did the dems put a gun to Bush's head, or the head of the American military? No! Because of their love of ordinary people. Ordinary people who elected them on promises that they no ordinary people understand must be compromised by 'political reality".

That the Reps just proved that political reality is a fiction, and that you actually can, radically, use the levers of power to put in place what you promised is something so outre, for the Dem punditocrats, that they can hardly get over it. It makes them all jittery about 'governance'. Governance, of course, is when you elect people on the premise that a campaign is a sort of magic trick - fun for the whole family, but you don't really expect people to be able to draw rabbits out of hats, do you? Similarly, the Dems ineffectuality has been promoted, by these pundits - of which there are many - as an actual virtue. The Dems would never put a gun to anybody's head. They would never put a salad fork to anybody's head. How could they with all the compassion flowing from their heart towards ordinary people?

I thought, two years ago, that the age of the Great Fly, Bush, was drawing to a close. I was wrong. Bush apparently is now the baseline for Obama, who is the very spirit of gentility. We are still very much in the Bush era. And there is no opposition. Stick a salad fork in the belly of American liberalism, cause it is dead!

Explosion, revolution, the third life

Almost the entirety of Juri Lotman’s life was spent in the Soviet Union. As Nataliia S. Avtonomova has pointed out in an overview of the L. & W., this distinguished him from other of the great 20th century Russian critics: Bakhtine, Jakobson, and Skhlovsky. Like these critics, Lotman was what was once called, in Wilhelmine Germany, a ‘cultural philosopher” – which meant a freelance sociologist, historian, critic, and psychologist. Freud used the phrase ‘wild analysis” to speak of a certain use of psychoanalysis – and indeed, although attached to culture and the life of reading to an extraordinary extent, the cultural philosopher did operate in the institutional wilds. Nietzsche, Simmel, Spengler form a certain geneology in this respect. Certain novelists – Mann, Musil, Broch, Canetti – were also wild analysts.

Of course, Lotman did have a university position and a recognized status, but his aim was broader than that of, say, enfolding semantics in a larger semiotics, Greimas’ project, or discovering the motifs of folktales – his aim, like Barthes, was to understand, stuffed to the gills with texts, the cultural currents of universal history in its modern phase under the distancing and clarifying guise of a demasker of myth – a mythographer’s evil twin.

At the end of his life, he toyed with the notion of explosion. The end of his life was the endtime for the battered Soviet hulk. It was definitely not a time of ‘revolution’ – or rather, revolution was directed against those powers which, in the twentieth century, grounded themselves in revolution. I think it is fair to say that Lotman’s ‘explosion’ was a response to the discrediting of revolution, which brought in its train the discrediting of the massive association between inspiration, new ways of living, opposition to routine, and the social space of adventure.

The paradox of Leninist revolution is that it codified and hardened the all encircling institutions – law, money, education – instead of leading to that blessed moment when all the mouse escape all the traps and we blow them up. Instead, blowing things up became what capitalism itself started to pride itself on doing – at the same time revolution was discredited, one began to hear Schumpeter’s phrase, creative destruction, used unthinkingly to praise the new and supposedly eternal order of capitalism dominated by a financial sector that engaged, at last, in the task of laying up its treasures – its derivatives – in the cybersphere to the tune of some 600 trillion dollars. A sum that approaches, in its dreadful fictitiousness, the beasts of the apocalypse.

Lotman was well aware that explosions – or ruptures, to use Foucault’s term – seem to imply a leap in place, a moment of absolute change, which indeed implies that revolution is possible. Foucault of course annuls the gesture by flattening history, separating it from progress, and thus making rupture merely part of a historical strip, which makes it, formally, a chronological movement forward, but takes away its hopefulness. The strip doesn’t really move towards closure, and the cardinal points of the episteme are merely reshuffled, like cards redistributed for each round of a card game.

Explosion, as Lotman uses the term, is connected to but not identified with creation. Or inspiration: Lotman, at a certain moment, quotes a passage in Pushkin’s Egyptian Nights that lays bare the relation between rupture and the ordinary as a kind of nonsense:

“He was a poet nevertheless, and his passion for poetry was indomitable; when he felt this nonsense approach (that was what he called inspiration), he locked himself in his study and wrote from morning till late night. He confessed to his genuine friends that he knew true
happiness only at such times. The rest of the time he led his dissipated life, put on airs, dissembled, and perpetually heard the famous question, “Have you
written a new little something?””

The nonsense is connected to happiness, and happiness is the unquestioned dominant, the total social fact, which frames modernity. More precisely, explosion is the force that connects and disconnects semantic spaces. And this is where I borrow the term, where I check it out of Lotman’s work and put it in my own. It is in this sense that we can, perhaps, think of the spread of the third life over the space of the imperial powers from the Renaissance to the beginning of the 20th century. The third life is the life of reading, of writing, and of its visual and aural counterparts that altogether saturated the natural world with the artificial world – to use highly tendentious categories – and by degrees made it impossible for populations to exist outside of the media sphere. To travel, to work, to eat, to remain in a room in a house or in a public space, all of these things have been flooded by the third life, the life that is neither sleeping nor simply waking but, instead, consists of reading or its counterparts – watching images, hearing music, etc.

Lost

A French schoolmaster and statistician, Louis Maggiolo, proposed, in the 1870s, to track the rise of literacy in France using, as an index, the signature on marriage documents. Signatures by the married couple or by their representatives were required from the 1670s, when Colbert, under Louis XIV, reformed the state administration of civil affairs – births, marriages, deaths. Now, there are many problems, as various historians have acknowledged, with using the signature as an index of literacy. For instance, we are projecting schooling that joins together reading and writing onto a period in which it wasn’t necessarily the case that they were taught in conjunction – it was for instance not uncommon for women to know how to read, but not how to write. And a signature can also be learned as a gesture, or a drawing, without the performer knowing how the letter signs really connect up. However, the very requirement tells us something about the changing relation between the state and its subjects. Literacy, on one level, was imposed by the state as an instrument of order and control. I’m less concerned about the rich uncles of the marriage certificate – the poem, the novel, the essay – than I am about the gradual awakening of the third life – the life of media, of reading, of visual, aural and print culture. Not as a rarity, but as an intrusion into both the private and public spheres (if we can use those terms to designate spaces in semi-literate societies).

I’m thinking of the everyday encounter with signs that label parts of the world. Imagine: once, the world for the vast majority of Europeans was criss-crossed by songlines; gradually, that world becomes shadowed by real signs, images, arrows, text.

I think about this a lot in Atlanta. I drive a lot in Atlanta. And as I just got married in Rockdale County, Georgia, in the presence of fifty witnesses, I have done a load of driving and a load of getting lost – the two have sort of merged in my experience – and I want to purge this storm of roads and directions and misdirections, to drain it from my blood.

Metro Atlanta is folded, spindled and mutilated among hillsides, obscure creeks, and mucho forestry. From the side of Stone Mountain, the bald granite peak that juts up a thousand or so feet in Dekalb county, you can see Atlanta skyscrapers rise apparently from a jungle on the horizon, so deep and extensive is the arboreal cover. But the trees cover the houses, shopping centers, roads, and business of a couple million people. The sheer mass of the people is a key to Atlanta’s chief business, which, for a long time, was growth itself – selling cheap houses to in-coming, and developing subdivisions out of farm and wasteland. And when you develop farm and wasteland, you have to have roads, plenty of roads. Because the in-comers have to incomes, which means they have to drive to work, such is the tear-bent nature of things in this part of the world, and they have to drive home. And because they have to drive, they have cars, and because they have cars, stores, pawn shops, Army-Navy stores, Chinese restaurants and a million Waffle houses spring up about five to ten miles from wherever you sit yourself down.

Literacy and transportation go hand in hand. For the roads, which are dumped on the landscape like God’s own spoiled spaghetti, clumping here and there and everywhere among the sea of trees, must be labeled somehow.

The first labels honored the developers, the only honor they would ever experience in their fishy lives, and various real or imagined flora, fauna, or sites. Then the old name streets are broken up by new developments that want to gloss off the old names and thus produce variations on them – here a Rockbridge Road, NE, there a Rockbridge Drive, NE, there a N. Rockbridge road, NE, there a S, Rockbridge Road, NE, ad infinitum. Then the state comes in and dubs certain of these roads parts of the greater Georgia Highway system, giving them numbers. Then the locals persist in hanging names on streets that have long shucked those names and assumed other ones. And finally, in the age of the GPS, the nautical grid of directions, all the southeasts and northwests, become ever more important in driving and hence in the way directions are disseminated, while left and right as cues become subordinate or quaint.

Into this soup there came a man – me – fresh from the streets and signage of Paris. Signage that was set up to lead a million tourists to a thousand monuments. Signage that forms its own dense culture, signage that sings of obscure histories, what with a plaque on every other building. This man, faced with a dark night in Lawrenceville, lost all sense of whether he was traveling east or west, north or south. On some days, he would miss every turn, and spend a good fifteen minutes going back and forth on a road, looking for the key to get into some parking lot.

Plus, I had the songline of my family – a family who has existed in this part of the world for a long time, now, and done many deeds, and had many adventures –singing in his consciousness, and sometimes on the phone, when I called up my brothers or sister and asked for directions. My friend Dave thought this was funny, and then he thought it was exasperating – to hear me, utterly lost, take a cell phone (a cell phone! So much have I become embourgeoisified since landing in the New World!) in hand and call my brother and hear him sing me across the private monuments of Stone Mountain to the arthritic flow of traffic on I 20.

But surely the impulse to sing the lines of family force across the landscape is merely buried under maps and GPS-es. And under those family lines, there is the great dying, and the Conquista, and our history – that is, the things that have exploded like big joke cigars in the face of humanity – as a planetary culture.